Donald Trump
Donald Trump (Image: AP/Gerald Herbert)

SHOT IN EUROPE

When it comes to regulating big tech, follow the Europeans’ lead and go after data. Europe wants to partner with a Biden administration to target Chinese tech dominance. Suzanne Moore leaves The Guardian as the paper descends into a frenzy of wokeness.

Meanwhile the UK Tories no longer stand for sound money — so what does that mean for being a Tory, and for what the Tories did to Britain after the financial crisis?

DREAM HANGOVER

Far-right wingers have fled to social media site Parler where they can enjoy the freedom Twitter and Facebook will no longer give them, they say. But even neo-Nazis want, and need, to censor things. Andy Fleming AKA Slackbastard looks at the fragmentation of the far right in Australia in the wake of the jailing of right-wing terrorist Phillip Galea.

Trolling the trolls in US fascist sites. Whatever happened to the 1990s It Site Drudge Report? It’s not quite clear. And some far-right radio hosts in the US are already moving on from Trump, conscious they have to keep the outrage bubbling.

BURNT SO LOW

Dehli’s mortal combat with air pollution (and, in a nice twist that subverts typical US-centric reporting, a comparison with San Francisco). Meanwhile, a plea from a despairing Indian about the country’s direction.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and why it embraced climate change as the other existential threat. And climate change is causing some Americans to be concerned about having children, a new study finds.

THINGS TO COME

Labor’s Andrew Leigh on new perspectives on the future of work. COVID-19 tracking apps are becoming more and more like state surveillance tools in some countries. Meanwhile, on the Internet of Shit: an outage on Amazon’s cloud service stopped robot vacuum cleaners and doorbells from working. Not necessarily a problem in the latter case because they can catch fire too.

In Russia, it’s very easy to turn networks of CCTV cameras into a private tracking device (don’t think that doesn’t happen in the west too). The use of technology by abusive partners and ex-partners is slowly being recognised as a major form of abuse. Here’s a quick introduction; its use in 2020 has skyrocketed.

YOU’RE IN A MESS

The mammoth coalition Joe Biden so successfully forged across progressive politics in the US can’t last for long and will soon fall apart without the uniting hatred of Trump. Innovation is wildly overhyped and self-serving on the part of tech companies, and we should be devoting far more public resources to maintenance. America can’t stop shit from getting into salads. Hillbilly Elegy is a profoundly mistaken diagnosis of the woes of the American working class.

PUPPY DRINK

Dog deemed too friendly to be a drug sniffing dog (maybe he just knows better about prohibitionist drug policies than people do?) is redeployed in more positive role. Finally, peer-reviewed evidence has emerged that some dogs don’t know their own strength when they bark.